Impact of ionospheric scintillation on GNSS receiver tracking performance over Latin America: Introducing the concept of tracking jitter variance maps

Abstract

Scintillations are rapid fluctuations in the phase and amplitude of transionospheric radio signals caused by small‐scale ionospheric plasma density irregularities. In the case of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, scintillations can cause cycle slips, degrade the positioning accuracy and when severe enough can even lead to complete loss of signal lock. This study presents for the first time an assessment of GNSS receiver signal tracking performance under scintillating conditions, by the analysis of receiver phase lock loop (PLL) jitter variance maps. These maps can potentially assist users when faced with such conditions; a potential application envisaged for these maps would be in the form of a tool to provide users with information about “current (or expected, if some sort of prediction can be developed in follow on research) tracking conditions” under scintillation; another possibility would be to use the technique described by Aquino et al. (2009) to mitigate against the effects of ionospheric scintillation. In this paper these maps were constructed for scintillation events that were observed in the field during 9–11 March 2011 over Presidente Prudente (22.1°S, 51.4°W, dip latitude ∼12.3°S) in Brazil, a location close to the Equatorial Ionisation Anomaly (EIA) crest in Latin America. Results show that the jitter variances estimated for all the simultaneously observed satellite‐to‐receiver links during the premidnight hours on 9 and 11 March 2011 increase during the enhanced scintillation levels, indicating the likelihood for cycle slips, loss of signal lock, and degraded accuracy in the observations.

High-latitude GPS phase scintillation and cycle slips during high-speed solar wind streams and interplanetary coronal mass ejections: a superposed epoch analysis

“…GNSS receiver tracking performance during severe scintillation conditions can be assessed by the analysis of receiver phaselocked-loop (PLL) jitter (Conker et al 2003;Sreeja et al 2011). At high latitudes, statistical characterization and climatology of scintillation of global positioning system (GPS) signals show prevalence of phase over amplitude scintillation with the phase scintillation primarily caused by steep ionospheric density gradients and irregularities associated with auroral and cusp precipitation and polar cap patches (Spogli et al 2009;Li et al 2010;Prikryl et al 2011aPrikryl et al , b, 2013aJiao et al 2013).…”

Climatology of GPS phase scintillation at northern high latitudes for the period from 2008 to 2013

“…This global ionospheric scintillation propagation model (GISM) aims to estimate various radio propagation effects including phase and amplitude scintillation. The GNSS receiver tracking performance during severe scintillation conditions can be assessed by the analysis of receiver phase-locked-loop (PLL) jitter (Conker et al, 2003;Sreeja et al, 2011;Sreeja, 2013, Prikryl et al, 2013a). Another method to mitigate the effect of ionospheric scintillation using TEC (total electron content) at 1 Hz was described by Tiwari and Strangeways (2015).…”

Impact and mitigation of space weather effects on GNSS receiver performance

“…3) of the PolaRxS receiver located at Bronnoysund, for varying levels of scintillation ) on the days analysed. The construction of PLL tracking jitter maps over a certain area was a novel idea introduced in Sreeja et al (2011b) which can be used to assess the tracking performance of GNSS receivers. Tracking error maps are contours maps of verticalised tracking errors which can be constructed over a certain area using the data from a network of GNSS receivers.…”